Transgender Day of Remembrance 2012

It was the autumn of 1998, late November. The previous month Matthew Shepard was found, barely alive and in a coma, having been tortured and tied to a fence near Laramie, Wyoming. The person who found the body thought at first it was a scarecrow.

Hester had just returned from entertainment engagements in Europe. She was a statuesque (over 6 feet tall and around 225 pounds) drag performer. She is said to have had an overwhelming stage presence. She was also reported to be very kind and well-liked by everyone in the community.

She was always nice to everyone. She was very, very, very liked by the whole community, so what happened to her was like a real shock.

–Charito Suarez

Around 6:15pm on November 28 Rita Hester’s neighbors heard loud banging coming from inside her Allston, MA apartment. One neighbor later reported that someone inside had yelled for help. Police were called and arrived around 6:30pm. They found Rita’s lifeless body in the apartment. It had multiple stab wounds.

Rita was last seen alive…other than by the killer or killers…as she left the Silhouette Lounge in Allston. Witnesses say two men followed her out of the club.

Police say there were no signs of forced entry, so they suspected that Rita must have known her killer. Fourteen years later we have seen no progress in solving the crime, though it was reopened for a while in 2006 at the request of Rita’s mother.

Members of Boston’s LGBT community had held a mostly spontaneous vigil for Matthew Shepard on Boston Commons, but there was little attention given to Hester’s murder. So the transgender people of Boston became a community and crested there own event. A speak-out and candlelight vigil was organized which drew around 200 transpeople and allies, followed by by a solemn procession from the Model Cafe in Allston to Hester’s apartment building.

Local media outlets such as the Boston Herald, the Globe and Bay windows referred to Rita as a “man leading a double life” rather than a transgender woman.

We were a curiosity and considered to be somewhat less than fully human by a lot of people.

The violence against transgender people is typically horrific. It’s possessed of a deranged kind of intensity, often. … These are not dispassionate shootings. These are up close and personal, and they’re done as if the perpetrator wanted to stamp out the very existence of that person.

Traditionally besides giving members of the community a chance to speak out, which I encourage you to do in the comments, TDOR concludes with a reading of the names, if they are known, of those who have been murdered since the last TDOR. TDOR has recognized 327 people murdered in the US alone…with an additional 300+ from other countries. Other organizations the world over have taken up the torch, including Group Activiste Trans in Paris, the Human Rights Commission of Tel Aviv, Diritti in Movimiento in Italy, and Europe’s TGEU.

TGEU reports 265 murders in the 12 months from November 15, 2011 to November 14, 2012. 126 of those murders were in Brazil, where murder of transwomen seems to be a sport. 48 murders of transpeople were committed in Mexico and 15 in the United States. Central and South America are the once again the hotbeds with Venezuela having 9, Honduras 8, Columbia, 6, Uruguay 6, and Guatemala 5. India leads Asia with 6 with Pakistan close behind at 5. Turkey leads Europe with 5. 80% of the murders of transpeople since 2009 have been in Central and South America. TGEU has been collecting their grim statistics since 2008. They count 1083 murders since January of that year.

Yet, we know, even these high numbers are only a fraction of the real figures; the truth is much worse.

These are only the reported cases, which could be found through internet research. In most countries, data on murdered trans people are not systematically produced and it is impossible to estimate the numbers of unreported cases.

–TGEU

Without further ado, here is the TDOR list for 2011-12, as amended to include some names which were omitted. In the end I have a list of 71 individuals, of whom 18 are Americans, if that makes a difference to you (as apparently it did to The Advocate, who even got the number wrong, failing to include Puerto Rico as part of the US).

The list is still being updated today. Some of the links below go to articles I have written which discuss the murders.

(Please note that in some parts of the world, it is typical to identify with only one name.)

Serap Guneser, 25, Antalya, Turkey, October 24, 2012, throat slit. When police arrived at the crime scene, they pepper-sprayed Serap’s friends, who were attemting to staunch the bleeding and delayed proceeding to the hospital. Serap died en route from loss of blood.